Liberators

by Rawles James Wesley

  They used Phil’s laptop to write summaries of key intelligence that would be useful if broadcast. These were transferred to memory stick and then sent via the courier network to Washington, where they were read over the air by ham radio operators and relayed to the newly reemerging U.S. mass media. Intelligence on specific targets that needed to be kept secret until after a resistance strike was carried via couriers to the communities within striking distance, where resistance cells were already in place. (Another intelligence cell in Vancouver had been doing the same since the first few months of the resistance war. This was the cell that had coordinated the sinking of the MN Toucan and MN Colibri, in the single-most effective resistance action of the war. It had inspired the formation of dozens of resistance cells.)

  Malorie got along well with everyone at the ranch. She and Claire were soon like a mother and daughter. Malorie enjoyed hearing the McGregors’ Canadian idioms. To the McGregors, a couch was a “Chesterfield,” a colored pencil was a “pencil crayon,” a table napkin was a “serviette,” tennis shoes were “runners,” a parking garage was a “parkade,” a fire station was a “fire hall,” and a restroom was a “washroom.”

  Phil, Ray, and Stan were all immediately attracted to Malorie, for both her looks and her abilities. When Claire mentioned them staring at her, Malorie joked, “Of course they’re interested. I could be plug ugly and they’d be interested. I’m the only single female in an eight-mile radius.”

  Malorie soon gravitated to Phil, but she did not make her interest clear immediately. Malorie found Phil to be a delightful coworker. Despite the stress of the heavy workload, Phil always maintained a good sense of humor. (Phil worked for eleven hours a day doing intel analysis, in addition to his ranch chores.) They shared the same faith in Christ, with an “all grace” outlook on salvation. She loved hearing his stories about Afghanistan and some of his more recent adventures with DCS Task Group Tall Oak. When the subject of his childhood came up, Phil said, “I suppose I had a very regimented upbringing, compared to most kids. It was very Russian.”

  “Russian?”

  “Yes. The family’s original paternal name was Adamski. My grandfather shortened it to Adams when he became a naturalized citizen. His parents—my great-grandparents—escaped the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war by traveling across Siberia to the city of Harbin, where there was a large Russian colony. My great-grandfather worked there for the Trans-Siberian Railroad.”

  Malorie seemed fascinated. “Tell me more.”

  “Okay, here’s the condensed version of how my folks got to the States: Both of my grandparents on my father’s side grew up in Harbin and came to the States separately. My grandmother left Harbin for Seattle to attend the University of Washington before World War II. After my grandfather got a master’s degree in electrical engineering in Harbin he went to Shanghai and somehow got a job in Australia, where he worked at the Mount Isa mine, with the ultimate goal of coming to the United States to marry my grandmother. He was in Sydney for the weekend when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The next day, he went to the U.S. embassy to try to join the U.S. Navy. But when he was there, he ran into a Merchant Marine captain who needed someone to fix a turbine since his ship’s engineer was in the hospital with a hot appendix. My grandfather fixed the turbine and stayed on the ship, leaving all of his clothes and books behind in Mount Isa. He spent the rest of the war in the Merchant Marines.”

  Phil continued, “While he was on leave on the West Coast in 1945 he married my grandmother. Then, years later when they were established in California, they ransomed my great-grandparents from the communists and brought them to the States, so my dad got to grow up with both sets of his grandparents living in a cottage on the San Francisco peninsula. So a lot of my grandfather’s and great-grandfather’s personalities rubbed off on my dad, which then rubbed off on me. The last of my grandparents died when I was ten years old, but a lot of their stories are quite well remembered, and a lot of their attitudes are firmly entrenched in me. They had a strong Christian faith and a deep distrust of totalitarianism—and, in fact, of most other ‘isms.’”

  • • •

  On Malorie’s third day at the ranch, it was wash day. Ray went out to start the Lister generator set, but it wasn’t long before he shut it back down and came into the house, looking glum. He kicked off his mud boots and walked to the kitchen table. He said, “We have a problem, ladies and gents: The engine is turning just fine, but the generator is not.”

  “Uh-oh,” Alan said.

  Alan, Phil, Malorie, and Ray all walked out to the generator shed together. Ray brought a rag and a flashlight.

  Examining the generator set, they could see nothing outwardly wrong, other than its usual small and chronic oil leaks. It was Malorie who spotted some metal filings beneath the coupling that joined the engine shaft to the generator shaft. “Hey, look here: Looks like it ate a Woodruff.”

  Phil, who only had rudimentary mechanical knowledge, asked, “What’s that?”

  Malorie pointed the tips of her index fingers together to illustrate. “The two shafts come together end to end, like this. A Woodruff spline keeps them aligned, and this coupling sleeve holds the spline in place, and the coupling is in turn held in place with these big Allen-head screws.”

  After a pause, she went on. “I’ll need a set of Allen wrenches—they look like three-sixteenths—but it could be a size smaller or larger, or possibly even metric. Oh, and I’ll also need some sort of degreaser, preferably in a spray can.”

  Ray nodded. “The Allen wrench you need is right here.” He pointed to a wooden tray of maintenance tools that had been power-screwed to the wall of the shed.

  Alan offered, “I used to have to tighten those Allen screws once every few months, but then I got wise and stared using green Loctite so that they don’t drift.”

  “I’ll be right back with a spray can of carburetor cleaner,” Ray said.

  While Phil held the flashlight, Malorie deftly loosened the Allen screws. Just as Ray stepped back into the shed with a spray can, Malorie slid the sleeve aside and chuckled.

  She said, “I knew this thing was old, but I didn’t know it was this old. This thing is pre-Woodruff.”

  “Meaning what, Mal?” Ray asked.

  “Meaning it is not a square Woodruff key that got eaten. It’s a taper key, which is what they used before Woodruffs became commonplace. That means that finding or making a replacement key will be a lot more difficult.”

  She went on to explain. “The good news is that keys are made from mild steel, with parallel sides and base. The top face of the key has a slight taper of just a one- or two-in-a-hundred ratio, which allows you to fit it into a keyway, followed by a rapid take-up of the slack in the hole, by the taper.”

  “So you’re saying that you have to fabricate a replacement for a part that you’ve never seen, because we only have a few fragments,” Ray said.

  “That’s right. I don’t suppose you have a dial micrometer?”

  “No,” Alan answered glumly.

  “But I’ll bet the Leaman ranch has one that we can borrow,” Ray offered.

  Mal looked up. “Also ask if they have a tube of some machinist’s Prussian blue. It’s also called blue dykem.”

  Ninety minutes later, Ray roared back to the ranch on his KLR motorcycle. He shouted, “Got ’em!”

  After spraying all of the parts with degreaser, Malorie used the projecting tips of the calipers to measure the keyways on the shafts and coupling in several places, and took notes.

  “Not only do I have to account for some taper, but the keyway also shows some wear, even though it was obviously harder steel than the spline. So to compensate, I’m going to have to taper the new key in two different axes.”

  She made the new taper key from a standard seven-sixteenths-inch threaded steel bolt. She wisely left the head of the bolt in place for most of the steps so that she’d have that to clamp firmly into Alan’s bench vise. An Aladdin mantle
lap was fetched and set up for light to work by.

  Malorie explained as she started: “Normally I’d use a milling machine or even just an abrasive cutoff wheel to work this down to the rough dimension, but of course we’re without power, so we’ll use the old-fashioned method. Namely, hand files and plenty of sweat.”

  The four of them took turns filing flats on four sides of the bolt shaft. After one hour and fifteen minutes, they were close to the requisite rough dimensions, and Malorie started measuring with the calipers more and more frequently. After nearly two hours of work, Malorie was doing all of the filing and all of the calipering as the three men stood back and watched. She let the work piece cool for a few minutes as she took a sip of water. Then she loosened the vise and dropped the workpiece into a rag.

  “Time for a sanity check,” she declared.

  After carrying the roughed taper key and the “mike” to the generator shed, she did a test fitting. She nodded. “I just wanted to make sure that I was visualizing the taper correctly in both axes.”

  After taking another measurement, she carried her work back to the vise in Alan’s shop.

  She continued with more filing, now much more deliberately, and taking regular measurements.

  Next, she sawed off the head of the bolt with a hacksaw and cleaned up that rough end with a bastard file.

  Over the next hour, she took three more trips back and forth to the generator shed between filing sessions. She now used the tube of blue dykem to mark the taper key so that when she did test fittings, contact with the high spots would become apparent.

  The finished taper key was tapered not only from top to bottom, but also along its length to compensate for the worn keyway.

  Installing the key took just a few light taps of a brass hammer. The coupling went on with ease. It was a perfect fit. The Allen screws were again cemented with green Loctite—a special formulation that was designed to break loose, when needed. (Standard clear cyanoacrylate glue was unforgiving and all too permanent, for machine screws.)

  Wash day began several hours late, but Malorie’s mechanical skills had saved the day. Describing the repair later to Claire, Alan commented, “It was like watching one of the Dutch Masters do an oil painting. That job would have taken me two or three days. We’re very lucky that Malorie came here when she did. Great timing.”

  Claire replied, “I don’t believe in happenstance. I believe in divine appointments. God brought Malorie to us for more than one reason. All of those reasons will become clear to us, with time.”

  • • •

  That evening, as they were washing and drying the dinner dishes, Phil said to Malorie, “You really amaze me. You’ve got a lot of hidden talents. Mechanical ability like yours is a rarity in men, and a great rarity in women.”

  She blushed slightly, and replied, “I’m sure you have hidden talents, too. I notice that you’ve hardly mentioned what you did when you were working in counterintelligence.”

  “Most of that doesn’t have much relevance to our work here. In fact, my knowledge of things like order of battle and terrain analysis date back to when I took my Officer Basic Course rather than my later work in CI.”

  “But I’m sure you have some great stories to tell about your cloak-and-dagger days.”

  “Nah. It was mostly just pushing paper.”

  41

  IN A PAST LIFE

  The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage.

  —Thucydides

  Seattle, Washington—June, Three Years Before the Crunch

  Phil Adams hoped that the Iranian hadn’t spotted him. If he had, then he might as well as pull the plug on the day’s surveillance.

  Phil was fortunate to still be in the loop. Most of his contemporaries disappeared into anonymous and mundane civilian life after their assignments ended and their clearances lapsed. But Phil had made the transition from active-duty military intelligence (MI) into intel contracting almost effortlessly, thanks to the longevity of Task Group Tall Oak, an ongoing DIA (and later DCS) program with proven success. Their specialty was industrial counterintelligence, but to some extent they were capable of “all source” intelligence gathering and analysis.

  Phil was a contract case officer specializing in offensive counterintelligence based in the smallest of the five Task Group Tall Oak offices on the West Coast, Tall Oak–Washington. When he mentioned his role to his sister, she said, “Wow, that sounds glamorous.” He quickly explained to her that it was actually a lot of hard work, and much of it involved boring report writing. As was typical in the counterintelligence world, it took hundreds of hours of work to generate a lead, and only a few leads panned out to be solid cases to follow. Their victories were few and infrequent, but each one was relished. Catching a foreign agent red-handed felt very rewarding, but since they were usually operating in the U.S. under diplomatic cover, their immunity protected them from prosecution. They would simply be declared persona non grata, and told that it was time for them to go home. Getting a foreign agent declared persona non grata (PNG or “Ping,” in CI slang) was considered a feather in the cap of any CI agent.

  The man Phil was observing now was with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). For days, they had been trying to catch him in the act of visiting a dead-drop microcache location. The MOIS, also known as VEVAK (Vezarat-e Ettela’at va Amniyat-e Keshvar), had agents who were some of the CIA’s most challenging opponents. The VEVAK was an outgrowth of the Shah Pahlavi–era SAVAK, and it was widely known that SAVAK got their training from the CIA and the Israeli Mossad during the 1960s. So the tradecraft employed by the Iranian MOIS was excellent.

  The MOIS agent stepped into his car with diplomatic plates, and then spent several minutes combing his hair, trimming his fingernails, and checking for specks of food between his teeth using the car’s rearview mirror. Finally, he popped a breath mint in his mouth before starting the car’s engine.

  Phil chuckled. This was not the behavior of a man who was afraid of being followed. No, this was the behavior of a man headed to a date. Phil started the engine of his own car and pulled out to follow. He trailed ten car lengths back. Using his hands-free microphone, he radioed in on the DCS Task Group Tall Oak secure network: “Subject in view, and rolling west on East Denny Way. Now crossing Twenty-fifth Avenue. No worries.”

  A minute later, Phil heard a tone on his earpiece, indicating that someone had joined the secure “chat.”

  Clarence Tang gave his usual “Hul-low there, guys” intro and then said, “I’ve got a situation. Mr. Lo, my former subject and now suspect at the Chinese consulate, just got a so-called secure e-mail asking for a meeting at ‘the usual place’ at noon. Based on his previous movements, I think that means the Main Post Office. Can any of you be there with your badges and credentials before noon?”

  Phil chimed in, “I can definitely be there. Let’s say we meet on the roof of the Republic parking garage—the Cobb Garage—on Union Street, at 1140 hours. I think it’s the closest one to the post office.”

  “Sounds good. I’ll brief you and show you photos of my two subjects.”

  • • •

  Clarence was there waiting, as expected, sitting in his silver “High-Speed Pursuit” Honda Hybrid, which was often the butt of jokes at the office.

  Phil parked nearby and walked over to the Honda. As he slipped into the passenger seat, he could immediately see that Clarence was agitated.

  “This could be it, Phil. A face-to-face between Mr. Lo and his corporate mole with Boeing, an engineer named Robert Chan.”

  He flipped open his laptop, keyed in a passphrase, and navigated to a file designated “T.O. Case 121—UCAS Follow-On.”

  Clarence continued. “What the Chinese are after is some stealth technology from a UAV that is under development by Boeing.” He deftly clicked the computer’s track pad and opened two street-surveillance photos, side-by-side. Pointing, he said, “This is the inscrutable Mr. Lo, and this
is Bob Chan. If we catch them passing data, we can arrest Chan, but Lo is beyond our reach since he has diplomatic immunity.”

  “But we can Ping him right out of the country.”

  “Right!” Tang replied excitedly. “And I brought two body cams to nail their assets.”

  “Perfect.”

  Phil was wearing black jeans, a polo shirt, and a tan windbreaker. He put the camera recorder in the jacket’s inside pocket. The camera’s tiny lens and microphone head were then pinned directly through the jacket to the recorder lead. The four needle-sharp pins on the back of the camera head served to both hold the camera firmly in place and pass the video and audio signals to the recorder leads. The lens and microphone head were built into a small enameled Ecology pin, effectively camouflaging it to casual observers.

  Clarence did the same with an identical camera through his gray Aéropostale hoodie jacket. He glanced at his wristwatch nervously, and said, “Showtime.”

  After stuffing his laptop into a rucksack and locking the car, they headed to the stairs in a trot. Two minutes later, they entered the Seattle Main Post Office (also known as the Midtown Post Office) through separate entrances. After scanning the lobby and the queue at the service counter, Phil took on the role of “indecisive shopper” at the rack of postal service shipping boxes, tote bags, and collectibles. Meanwhile, Clarence got in the long noon-hour line of customers approaching the service counter.

  Two minutes later, at 11:57, Mr. Lo arrived. He was wearing polished shoes, dark pants, and a black raincoat. He pulled some junk mail out of a trash receptacle and pretended to study mail-order catalogues.